Customer Reviews

Musca Domestica (Barnard New Women Poets Series)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I am disheartened by the most recent reader reviews of Miss Hume's Musca Domestica. I wonder what's at stake for these readers to excoriate a poet's first book so aggressively, especially since they clearly mistake style for something having to do with the poet's personality--that Hume purposefully, for the sake of "being hip," makes her poems "inaccessible." Style is an ideological position, and Hume uses the housefly to underscore what it means to make poetic decisions: the veerings-off and anxious cleanings and cleavings of the housefly are perfect tropes for a certain kind of poetic intent. This book is tongue-tying, flirtatious and beautiful: its 'meaning' is the story of a medium, and is not the story of a personality nor the narrative of a feeling. That the book might defy certain people's theories about what a poem "should be" is just another selling point for me--personally, I'm sick of the straight story. Give me the crooked details of illegible postcards and a "body remembering itself as part of a house" so I can be more in touch with what is means to live with and work against the languages we think through. This book is not the mockery it's made out to be in recent reviews--it crackles with living verbs, it troubles language but doesn't make it run away.

This is a stellar collection, one of the best books of poetry to come out within the last five years. Hume's imaginative and lexical virtuosity are stunning; this woman can flat-out write--she infects, vivisects, reinvents, and sheds tropes and rhetorics with ingenuity and exhilirating speed; there is nothing her sentences won't or can't do. These poems do not shy away from complexity(asking them to do so is to deny what it feels like to inhabit our respective mortal nimbuses astride a blue pill in the vortexical whirl of space, i.e. is cowardly and reductive and anti-human); they are unrelentingly sensual, rabidly intellectual, awe-inspiring in terms of rendering the treacheries and odd wonders of consciousness. The language is riotous, sophisticated, brilliant, the formal invention masterful. Christine Hume is a visionary poet, Musca Domestica a gospel of the in-between-- this book is alive. If you can't hang with it, grab some William Collins, hail the short taxi, and sleep the sleep of stones.

I know a reader-review should respond to the book itself, and not the comments of the other reviewers, but this recent batch of negative reviews are so wildly off the mark that they beg correction. I don't know what these readers are thinking, but it seems to me like they either haven't read 'Musca Domestica' or simply lack the faculties to read it fairly.

In any case, potential buyers, don't be discouraged by these nonsensical reviews. 'Musca Domestica' is an incredibly rewarding book: the poems are only difficult in the way that the most intriguing and beautiful puzzles are difficult. These poems reward in every way: Ms. Hume manages to be funny and poignant and provoactive and weird all at once, and the more time you spend with this book the more delightful it becomes.

Give 'Musca Domestica' a try -- the poems have earned it, and the book will richly repay your attention!

And to you 'readers' in the one-star crowd: snap out of it, kids.

Modern poetry comes in many different styles. Anything can be considered a proper poem, and poets are free to write in many differing styles about an infinite variety of subjects. However, that freedom comes with the need to be understood. Modern poets make certain that their readers are not abandoned by the poem's form or content. Hume's poetry is too abstract, alienates readers, and is sloppy.

Being able to experiment in form while remaining accessible is a difficult balancing act that many modern poets perform quite well, BUT not Hume. This poetry does not accomplish a synthesis between form and expression. Rhythmically, the poems can be considered to be written in free verse, and the rhythm of the poems is simple and sing-songy. Hume's work is too extreme for most readers. Her determination to not have her poetry to conform to certain grammatical standards is too forced and stretched. There is a underlining lack of emotions in her poetry that rings false to readers.

This book is overly concerned with epistemology and as such comes across sounding too studied, too forced, with very little poetic attraction at all. It is forced-sounding with a repetitive housefly imagery throughout the poetry. WHY HOUSEFLIES? The housefly imagery completely takes over and leaves the author with very little room to explore. The poems sound forced and unnatural. The poetry has an identifiable agends that is NOT flexible enough to be important and accessible. This work is ONLY intended for poets or postmodern theorists concerned with not making any sense.

I wrote one of the first reviews of Musca Domestica on Amazon.com, and am revisiting the site with the knowledge that Christine Hume's next book, Alaskaphrenia, has won the Green Rose Prize and will be published by New Issues in 2004.

Many of the negative reviews of Musca Domestica stem from misconceptions.

Several reviewers have complained that there is no emotion to Hume's poetry, implying that a work must be emotional to be poetic. The implied point is debatable, but let's clear the air and say that her work IS largely intellectual. If you are looking for accessible poetry, this is not the book to choose. If you are looking for the avant-garde, poetry that requires several readings, or poetry that specifically tries to deconstruct linguistic norms, THEN you should choose Musca Domestica.

Regarding two points made by a recent reviewer: that the book is disconnected in content and that, if it was great, Hume would have immediately followed it with another. First of all, the book is tightly bound by a thematic/linguistic link: the use of the fly imagery. Another reviewer even lamented this fact, claiming that it leaves little room for originality (leaving me to wonder what that reviewer thinks of formal constraints such as sonnets, quatrains, etc). The opening poem is essentially a list of definitions and phrases associated with the word fly. Virtually all the poems in the book play in some way or another with this word, and even those that deviate from a strict link are still bound by the haphazard nature of a fly's path. I repeat, the path is not narrative but thematic. Secondly, the majority of poets do not operate on a publishing scale like Stephen King. As a general rule, the ones who turn out books of poetry by the handful are self- or vanity-published and very elementary (read: Hallmark verse). There is no timeline which a poet must stick to in order to be "good."

The last point is one that several reviewers have already made: Modern vs. Postmodern. Hume is primarly a Postmodern poet. I won't take umbrage with the reviewers who dislike Postmodernism as a whole; that is their perogative. But please, don't disparage Hume for not writing like a Modernist. Apples to oranges.

Whether you're going to praise or condemn Musca Domestica (and I continue to praise it), please do so on its own merits and place within Poetry.

Clearly someone has a chip on his/her shoulder (see previous 3 reviews). Such is the nature of poetic communities. Musca Domestica is not for everybody. The book does not deliver home-spun anecdotes across flat prose 'lines.' It is, nonetheless, a very strong piece of poetic work with an uncommonly wide range of appeal. With some intellectual and emotional moxie, even fans of Dobyns/Dunn (I think they're the same dude) should be able to find real power here. Afficionados of the deeper American tradition (Stevens, Whitman, Dickinson) will find nothing here not to like.

This is one of the most original books of poetry I've picked up all year. Hume's writing is ambiant, lush and laced with bizarre images (many of them about fruit flies) that culminate in a kind of stereoscopic buzz of lingual energy. There is vigorous word play here and real music. Nothing starchy or ahrythmic. Reminds me of C.D. Wright fused with James Dickey. Feed on this.

Christine Hume has a mastery of language and imagery without having lost the ability to conjure emotion from the reader. Her nature ranges from the playful in poems like "Various Readings of an Illegible Postcard" to the soul-striking lines in "Extracted Gravity"- "Several rains at once corrupt us / moths and rust affront us; one of us leaves / thunderstruck as the historian clutches her curious heart" to the sentimental and melancholy "Articulate Initials." These are poems with a personality. That is to say, they don't just stand on their own. They propel themselves from the page. Read one of them aloud to yourself and you will be blown away by the sudden force your own voice now possesses. This is not easy reading. You can't sit down with Musca Domestica on a cold winter night and expect to get up five minutes later with a warm, cuddly feeling. Once you begin reading, however, your mind will wrap itself around the words contained therein until you come away with a sense of accomplishment and deeper meaning.

Agreed, Hume's poems are not written in a common language. She shys away from religious feeling, and instead includes vulgarity. Her work is extreme nor does her poetry conform.

When compared to Billy Collins this is obvious. At the next cocktail party, I will not be able to show off my erudition with Hume's poems, as I can with Collins. In fact, Hume has proven that vulgarity is still possible even today!

Yes, as I sip my skim milk, nibble on my dry bland toast, revel in the next episode of "Friends," I too am looking for a poet who aims for the middle ground, who shys away from extremes, and who conforms, especially a poet who isn't so engrossed with the world as to spend an entire book considering the wonders and the fantasies of houseflies.